The Lost Age – The Ichythids (or Ichlyds) and Beyond

On Friday, I spoke a bit about the human-centric nature of the Lost Age world and the current campaign(s) I’m running. (Thank you everyone who chimed in with some input on the questions I raised about potential player push-back on the idea. It helps!) If you missed it, you can check it out here.

Vector black and white image of the Sea King (Dollar Photo Club)

But today I want to go over the approach I’m using for some of the “monstrous” races the PCs will encounter in the world. If you’ve read Serpents Below, you’ve seen another example of this approach.

In “They Came From the Lake,” our heroes come face to face with a strange group of fish men. Though I’ve been using the 5e version of Sahaugin for stats, I’ve never looked at them quite the same way. Though they are definitely fish-like, I’ve always taken more of the H.P. Lovecraft approach for the Deep Ones (“The Shadow Over Innsmouth”). They definitely come from a pre-Cataclysmic time in the Lost Age world, where entire civilizations of strange creatures existed without much concern for the human realms.

I’ve hinted already at the fact that there is still an undersea kingdom of the fish people known as the “Kingdom of the Open Waters.” There was an exchange recorded a while back (think of it as letter writing in an undersea world, which in and of itself could be a difficult proposition)… You can see it here.

But I suspect that long before that, when there were major forces vying for supremacy on the face of the planet, there were human beings who made a deal with underwater deities and eventually began to transform from dwellers in the world above to dwellers in the world beneath the waves.

There are likely other creatures who have also survived in some way since before the Cataclysm (happening about the time Pangaea split up). A few possibilities include: